1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to computers, and more particularly to apparatus, method and computer program product embodiments for facilitating deduplication product testing in a computing environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
Computers and computer systems are found in a variety of settings in today's society. Computing environments and networks may be found at home, at work, at school, in government, and in other settings. Computing environments increasingly store data in one or more storage environments apart from the interface that computer users typically associate. In many cases, the storage environments are located across wide area networks (WANs), in which data is sent to/received from a storage system located remotely from the host.
In some situations, data storage is provided locally and also provided to a remote storage environment to enhance data security by providing redundancy. In these situations, several instances of data may be stored in multiple locations. While this scenario provides for failsafe recovery in the event of data loss at one location, the maintenance of a number of redundant copies expends resources, such as consuming network bandwidth.
To combat this issue, data deduplication mechanisms are being implemented in greater frequency. Data deduplication refers to the elimination of redundant data. In the deduplication process, duplicate data is deleted, leaving only one copy of the data to be stored. However, indexing of all data is still retained should that data ever be required. Deduplication mechanisms reduce the required storage capacity since only the unique data is stored.